Memories of a Mongoose
by Dr. Phoenix
Summary: Based on a combination of "Rikki-tikki-tavi" and "Jungle Cubs: Mondo Mungo." After being envenomed, Rikki (formerly known as Mungo) describes his past history in dealing with snakes. Disney and Kipling own all.
1. Chapter 1

For those of you who have never been envenomed, allow me to shed a bit of light on the matter: **IT HURTS!** First there's the feeling of something sharp snapping shut over the part of you that gets bitten. Try accidentally getting your paw slammed shut in a door made of thorns, and make sure you close the door with enough speed and strength that you feel like screaming. After that, what starts out as a terrible sting, like an entire nest of hornets at once, then intensifies into a scalding burn, the pain growing worse by the moment. The natural instinct is to writhe in such agony, but the bite must be kept below the heart, and moving only speeds the venom through the bloodstream.

Of course, this is only the initial bite. Swelling sets in almost immediately, and the rest of the symptoms depend on which species of snake was the one to administer the wound. Common problems include nausea, difficulty breathing, and trouble breathing.

"Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes," Chuchundra reminds me.

"Save your grief until after I breathe my last!" I retort. "It's bad enough that Darzee's already begun yet another song in the garden!"

Even from the cushion where I rest, I can hear his latest masterpiece:

 _By eventide we weep!_

 _Descend, eternal sleep,_

 _Upon the killer who gives his life to save our own!_

 _He goes into the gloom_

 _Of darkness to his tomb!_

 _Valiant snake killer who lost his life to win our own!_

 _In the garden shall he lie_

 _Let us pray_

 _For the day_

 _When spring blooms shall never die_

The first three verses of this song were unbearable. The fourth through twelfth verses were even worse. Now at the thirty-seventh verse, I fear I have died and been sent to a place of punishment. With every stanza, I feel my patience being pushed far beyond its limits, and I believe that things couldn't possibly get worse, but then Darzee sings yet another line. When his myriads of verses finally reach a conclusion, he simply begins another seemingly endless song.

Please understand I don't mind music. My human family often sings. Even when I lived in the jungle, there were various birdsongs almost constantly. I might not have musical talent myself, but I certainly see no reason why those who do shouldn't have the chance to use it.

However, Darzee never seems to know the appropriate time to sing. That stupid tuft of feathers often sings of my triumph before I even finish my latest battle, often accidentally placing me in even greater danger! In addition, he never judges the correct time to begin my funeral song. Through the years, Darzee has mourned my death fifty-two times, all of which have proven far too early.

Furthermore, I greatly tire of hearing about myself. I am not a god to be worshipped, nor am I a kindred spirit who guards the garden and must be praised in order to remain there. I am simply a mongoose who does what comes naturally to my kind: killing snakes if confronted. However, almost every snake who has died in this garden has caused Darzee sing innumerable songs of my praises. He won't even speak to me without using several complimentary adjectives.

There is still work to be done. I move from the cushion, exaggerating my limp from the snake bite to my paw. Slowly, I drag myself to the garden, gasping for air. The ebony sky has begun to lighten. Soon it will be dawn, and Chuchundra will cease creeping around the corners of the room.

"Anguish!" I scream. "Let my death be swift! I would rather come to the end of my suffering than live to see the sun rise a final time!" I pant for breath again. "All is lost!"

I fall, jerking a couple times before become completely still. My shallow breathing worsens.

"Chua!" I gasp. "Chua!"

I hear the soft patter of rat paws coming closer. Chuchundra is rarely of any use, but there are few things, if any, that Chua doesn't know about the garden. His espionage skills are beyond compare.

"What is it?" he asks.

"I'm dying," I inform him. "You see I am already paralyzed. Beg the viper to spare my human friends! He has what he wants. The mongoose is dead. Why harm…?"

I am no longer able to speak. My eyelids flutter.

"I'll tell him," Chua promises. "I'll send a messenger. I'd go myself, but you know what snakes do to rats."

My eyes shut, and I stop fighting the shadow that has loomed before me.


	2. Chapter 2

Thanks to Darzee's mouth, everyone knows about my misadventures with Nag and Nagaina. What my friends seem to forget is that these were not the first cobras I fought.

Being a mongoose, I prefer eating whatever I can scratch up in the dirt: insects, worms, small lizards, mice, eggs, etc. Sometimes I eat small fruits. Thanks to a common myth, humans seem to think every mongoose has some natural instinct to go out of his way to pick a fight with every snake in the area, especially cobras. This is simply not true. While we do eat snakes, even various species of cobra, we generally prefer meals that aren't so much work.

If any creature doubts my words, here is a simple experiment. Get a piece of food. Dig in the dirt a few times. Eat the food. That was easy enough, right? Now get another piece of food. Walk up to it, making sure to circle several times before you pace back and forth. Back up as fast as you can. Run forward and repeat the procedure until you're sick of it; then do it two or three more times. Jump over the food until you feel exhausted. Run around behind your food. Start beating your entire body against the nearest tree or rock while you spin in circles. Have someone throw thorns, stones, and other objects for you to dodge from the time you first approach your food to the time you stop spinning because you're too dizzy and bruised to move anymore. Now you may eat.

Any animal with half a brain would conclude that digging a little is far easier than this difficult test of agility, strength, and tolerance for pain. That's a bit what it's like for a mongoose when considering whether to dig up some worms and grubs or go challenge the nearest cobra to a duel. We can fight snakes, but unless we're famished or a snake just happens to cross our path at the wrong time, we usually won't bother.

However, my mother had the mistaken idea that it was every mongoose's sworn duty to kill snakes, and the more venomous, the better. Cobras were especially essential to the mongoose diet because of their large size. Small snakes can be just as deadly, if not more so, than the larger ones, but there's a common idea that bigger is always better, so even though it might be more work killing a small snake, it's not nearly as glorious.

My mother had a lot of strange ideas. For example, she believed that every mongoose ought to strive toward the dream of living in a human home. While I don't object to the idea of living with humans, we are still wild animals. If every mongoose in the world was adopted by a human family, it could upset the entire balance of nature.

Once my mother really outdid herself with illogical thinking. She told me that I was old enough to be out on my own in the jungle, that I no longer needed her or my siblings. The time had come for us all to fend for ourselves.

Needless to say, I was frightened. The jungles of India, although beautiful, can be extremely dangerous to someone who lacks the proper experience or survival skills. Furthermore, I was a very young mongoose, not even in my adolescence. I feared I was too young to survive on my own, that I would surely perish from my own naivety. Not knowing what to do, I wandered through the jungle until I became lost. Frightened, confused, and lonely, I began to weep.

The first creature I saw was a young python. If I had been wiser, I would have known to have nothing to do with him. My mother had repeatedly emphasized the importance of prudence when dealing with venomous snakes, but she had failed to explain that a snake that constricts around its prey is more dangerous to a mongoose. These kinds of snakes will eat anything they manage to catch, and they generally grow far too large for us to sink our teeth into the backs of their heads.

However, this python seemed more interested in being friends than waging war. Despite his friends telling him that we were destined to become enemies, we decided to maintain our friendship in secret. When two cobras attacked him, I easily managed to defeat them. I hadn't thought about fighting any snakes that day; I was just trying to defend a friend.

Cobras eat other snakes. In fact, they even eat other cobras. Although I was a novice who had never even seen a live cobra, let alone fought one, I didn't want my friend to be killed, and it was within my power to keep him alive. It was as simple as that.

I made a huge mistake that day. Rather than fighting to the death, I only fought until the cobras were defeated. I should have killed them. If I had known what would happen later, I would have made sure both cobras were dead before I let them out of my sight.


	3. Chapter 3

Everything was finally going well. I had a friend, and I had proven capable of defending not only myself, but others as well. I already knew how to find food and shelter. However, I was shaken every time I thought about fighting with the cobras.

As I was out for a walk one day, I once saw a large, nonvenomous snake coiled around a monkey. Could a cobra squeeze the life out of prey if necessary? I decided not to mention the incident to my friend. I didn't want him thinking that I didn't trust him or had developed a fear of snakes that were capable of eating him.

Another time when I was foraging for food, I saw a dhole limping. He had obviously been bitten by a venomous snake. Climbing into the lower branches of a tree, I watched as life gradually ebbed from the dhole, who writhed in torment, suffering dreadfully until he was finally overtaken by death.

I was too proud to admit it, even to myself, but I had developed a bad case of ophidiophobia. Seeing the damage that snakes could do, I vowed to myself that I would never again fight another serpent of any species. However, most snakes were more than happy to avoid me, so I didn't have any trouble.

If it hadn't been for the worst monsoon of my entire life, I might still be living in the jungle to this day. However, once as I was visiting my mother, who made sure to check often to see if we were alright, even though she had told us to fend for ourselves at an early age, torrential rain began falling.

"Stay here, Mungo," she advised. "When the storm has passed, then you can continue on your way."

I had barely reached my adolescence, so I was more than happy to have a chance to stay in the den where I had been raised. The floodwaters must have had ideas of their own, for they carried me away. I nearly drowned, but a small human boy and his father took pity on me and did what they could to revive me.

I pondered the situation: Should I stay with the humans, or should I return to my natural habitat? The jungle had dangers like snakes and floods. The humans were kind, and helping myself to whatever food they offered me was even easier than digging up worms.

There was only one problem: The human child called me "Rikki-tikki-tavi" as a name because of the sounds a mongoose makes. That was most insensitive of him. I'm certain no humans would be pleased to have names like "Blahblah-chatter-sigh" or "Giggle-clearthroat-squeal."

However, I reminded myself that it wasn't his fault. Since we didn't speak each other's respective languages, I couldn't simply explain that my name was Mungo. Besides, it's not that "Mungo" was that great of a name either. It sounds like "mongoose" with the vowel sounds backwards: "mun" instead of "mon," and "go" instead of "goo." Anyone who says the name "Mungo" and the word "mongoose," omitting the "s" of the latter word, in repetition will easily see how I got my name. For all her strange ways of thinking, my mother was surprisingly short of creativity, but I digress.

Furthermore, I'm sure Teddy didn't mean to be insensitive. He was only a little boy, after all, and "Ricky" is apparently a name for certain humans, so "Rikki" probably seemed like a great idea for a mongoose name. Perhaps Teddy gave me the name in an attempt to chatter back at me, trying to communicate in my native tongue.

As I have mentioned previously, Darzee couldn't keep a secret if his life (or anyone else's) depended on it. That being, I will not describe what happened when my human family adopted me. Everyone already knows about Nag and Nagaina, how I went from lacking all confidence and fighting ability to emerging from a cobra's den in triumph. For the record, I would like to mention that Darzee greatly exaggerates details.

I killed the krait by accident. I was digging for insect larvae when I saw what looked like a lizard head sticking up out of a small hole. When I bit into it, I was surprised to hear it hiss, so I immediately dropped it. However, it was too late; the damage had already been done. I had broken the neck that I had bitten. When I saw what kind of snake I had killed, a krait, I felt somewhat better. I had killed a venomous snake. I could handle the cobras.

After I had my supper from the human table that evening, I walked out to the garden and killed Nag. He struck repeatedly, always missing. When the opportunity was right, I struck, crushing his skull between my teeth. In the throes of death, he rolled a few times. That's all there was to it.

Recalling a story about how domestic cats left dead mice for their humans as tokens of love and displays of prowess, I thought to leave Nag's body for my human family. I remembered that Teddy's father often took a bath of a morning, so I thought I should leave the dead snake in the bathroom, but Nag was so long that his tail knocked over a few things as I brought him into the room.

Fearing robbers, Teddy's father hurried to the bathroom with a gun. Seeing Nag's slithering tail, he gasped sharply and shot at the snake's body. I immediately dropped my quarry while Teddy's father began muttering words that are best not repeated. To paraphrase, he wasn't at all happy about seeing a cobra in his bathroom in the middle of the night, but he thought the snake had been lying in wait, and I had valiantly fought him to save everyone's life.

I saw Nagaina on the veranda the next morning. When she saw me, she fled. Feeling more confident than ever, I chased her, and as you might have guessed, I managed to kill her. We fought near the entrance to her den. When I dragged her dead body from the den area, Darzee somehow came to the outlandish conclusion that I had killed Nagaina in her own den, and when I dropped the snake's corpse at Teddy's feet while he ate breakfast on the veranda, his parents got the mistaken idea that the snake must have been crawling under the table. After breakfast, Darzee's wife told me about the snake eggs in the melon bed, and I destroyed them at my leisure to avoid any further confrontations.

Whose story is true? Does Darzee exaggerate greatly, and I am not as valiant as I seem, or does he speak the truth about the perils I faced fighting the two cobras, but I am too modest to make myself seem like a hero?

None of that mattered, for when I had time to look over the faces of the dead cobras, I realized this was not the first time I had fought either of them. These were the two snakes that had almost eaten my young python friend when I had lived in the jungle.


	4. Chapter 4

In all the time I have lived here, I have had very few confrontations with snakes. To hear Darzee describe it, you'd think I killed twenty snakes a day with my eyes shut. I personally was more concerned when I heard there was another mongoose in the garden.

"Oh, valiant Rikki!" Darzee exclaimed one day. "Last night I saw your most beauteous sister!"

Of course I wouldn't mind sharing my garden with any family members or friends. Some species of mongoose do tend to be social creatures, and I got enough food from the humans that I was certain the garden would be able to provide enough small creatures in the dirt for another mongoose to eat her fill. Surely there was enough space in the garden to allow us both to live in peace, especially since I often stayed in the humans' home. There was no need for confrontation; however, there was still just one minor problem: I don't have a sister.

After giving the matter considerable thought, I slipped out to the garden that evening to see if she was still there. I found her foraging under a fruit tree. I had decided to start with neutral conversation rather than demanding an explanation.

"Good evening," I greeted.

She didn't bother looking up. "Good evening."

"I heard there was another mongoose in the garden, and I thought she might be my sister."

"Well, I'm not!" She caught and ate a scorpion. "Listen well! I know you must be the house mongoose that lives here. This is your territory. I respect that. However, I know you rarely come to the garden at night, and it's a great place to forage. That being, I give you the garden by day, but by night, when you aren't using the place anyway, I see no reason why I shouldn't have the right to search for food. If this compromise isn't good enough for you, then you'll have to propose an idea you consider reasonable or fight me to challenge my right to your garden."

"Search the garden for food night or day," I answered. "Why should I fight you for beetles when I eat delicacies from the humans' table? However, in exchange for allowing you to share my garden, I trust you would also share the responsibility of keeping it safe from snakes when necessary."

"You mean like that one I killed yesterday?"

I nodded.

The compromise works out nicely. We rarely even see each other. Sometimes when one of us is bored or needs advice, we'll actually hold conversation, but we're still more like casual acquaintances than true friends, but I have digressed greatly.

I had just been discussing how I feel as I gradual succumb to the venom of the viper that has been plaguing the garden lately. He's clever. He knows how to dodge until a mongoose is too tired to fight, seizing the opportunity to flee for his life. So far, I've fought him seven different times, all of which have ended in a draw. However, I can't risk having a viper around the garden. If Teddy accidentally gets too close, the viper could bite him.

When I challenged the viper this afternoon, I was the one bitten. I spent the day growing weaker from the symptoms of the venom. Now I have crawled out to the garden as my breathing begins to cease.

Here is the sound of snake scales slithering closer. My enemy is close. No doubt he has come to gloat.

"So he is dead!" the viper hisses. "Paralyzed by my venom! I like that!"

He moves closer.

Big mistake! In an instant, I leap to my feet, seizing him by the back of the head. I can hardly believe it as the body ceases to wriggle. He's dead. I've finally won.

"You're an idiot!"

I turn to see the female mongoose, who is glaring at me in disapproval.

"One, with the exception of this viper, no snake is stupid enough to believe that a mongoose died of envenomation," she sighs. "Everyone knows that although we're not completely immune to snake venom, it takes twenty times more venom to kill us than it does to kill other creatures our size. We also have thick fur that helps protect us from fangs. Usually when a mongoose is bitten, the worst that happens is feeling a bit ill for a few hours, but it rarely gets that bad."

"Thank you for pointing out my mistake," I answer, beginning to eat the viper. "I didn't hear you come up with anything."

She sighs again. "Second, paralysis is a symptom of cobra bites. There are different kinds of snake venom. A cobra's bite attacks the brain, and the victim dies of a stroke or suffocation when the lungs cease to function. A viper's bite attacks the system of blood within the body. If that viper had stopped and thought a moment, he'd realize your little death scene couldn't possibly have been from his venom. Your symptoms were wrong."

I swallow another mouthful. "Are you going to help me eat this or stand there and criticize all night?"

"I have to do something." She comes over and bites into the dead viper. "Darzee praises you too much. You could use a little criticism to keep it from going to your head. I bet you can't even tell a proper story."

"You're right." I shrug. "I can't. I start to tell about something, but then I have too many sidesteps and doubling back."

She laughs. "Naturally! That's how a mongoose fights, so it's how we speak!"

The more I think about it, the more I realize her conclusion makes no sense at all. Fighting has nothing to do with speaking. However, it seems better to hold my tongue than to argue with a woman.

It's actually more dangerous than arguing with a cobra.


End file.
